1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is in the field of telecommunications, and pertains particularly to acquiring contact center statistics of a service provider site from the point of a consumer site for the purpose of determining best routing strategy for event routing.
2. Discussion of the State of the Art
In the field of contact center operations there are companies that use contact center services provided by a service provider according to contract to help them with sales, service, and customer relations management (CRM). Many of these companies have their own contact center service capabilities, but contract out for additional support such as a peak periods or times of high call volume. Such arrangements between contact center sites are known in the art as federated service arrangements, and a group of two or more contact centers in this case share duties. The arrangement of two or more contact centers, typically but not necessarily owned by different enterprises, sharing duties and tasks is termed a federated contact center (FCC).
In a federated contact center federated entities or contact center sites assume two roles, that of a service consumer and/or a service provider. As a service provider, a federated entity may determine to expose to a consumer only queue type objects such as routing points (RPs) and automated call distributor (ACD) queues. Further event processing may be performed on the provider site transparently to the consumer.
In many federated service arrangements, it may be desired by the service consumer that it be enabled to observe service provider queues in order to be able to make decisions on an ongoing basis about the volume of events that will be routed to the provider for servicing. To make such decisions, the service consumer needs to monitor vital contact center statistics such as average speed of answer (ASA), expected or estimated wait time (EWT) and so on.
In order to calculate statistics for provider queues, a monitoring application is required to receive all events related to the provider queues. This means that provider agent events have to be accessible to the service consumer. In many cases, such access violates provider intent to expose only a small part of its infrastructure to the consumer.
Therefore, what is clearly needed is a system and methods enabling a consumer in a federated contact center arrangement to monitor provider queues for statistics without having full visibility of the provider's infrastructure.